Geoffrey Barker

Broadcast:

Monday 1 December 2003 5:55PM

The Wages of Spin

Supporting Information

The US-led war to oust Saddam Hussein has been a remarkable case study in the globalisation of political spin and its consequences. It is, of course, too soon to judge the ultimate outcome of the pre-emptive rush to war by the US, the UK and Australia against Iraq, but what you might call the wages of spin are already painfully clear.

Political spin is the term of art for the manipulation and management of public perceptions and opinions about political issues. In an age of globalised and instant mass communications it includes selling a war to sceptical or resistant electorates by, if necessary, exaggerating, embroidering or "sexing up" the nature of the threat and the enemy.

What was striking about the Iraq war was the similarity of the spin presented by US, British and Australian leaders to justify their armed intervention. All three leaders rested on the authority of their intelligence agencies for what they claimed were "the facts" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Bush, Prime Ministers Blair and Howard and their senior ministers played off each other, borrowing language and ideas from each other as needs arose to reinforce what were heavily contested arguments for war.

This was not a conspiracy because no conspiracy was necessary. It was rather interaction and cooperation based on common interests and mutual dependency. Yet their spin was misleading in at least four ways.

First, the leaders released only selected and limited details of the intelligence information which they said supported their case for war--without explaining that much intelligence information is uncertain and ambiguous. Secondly, it became apparent that some crucial information about Iraq's weapons had been wrong or exaggerated or "sexed up" to alarm the US, British and Australian publics. Thirdly, it became apparent that the war was really being fought for other ideological and geo-political reasons thought desirable by the coalition partners. Fourthly, all three governments sought to traduce individual experts who criticised them . . . Joseph Wilson in the US, Andrew Wilkie in Australia, and, in the UK, David Kelly, who committed suicide in the midst of the controversy.

With ongoing violence still killing civilians and American and British soldiers in Iraq months after President Bush's premature declaration of the end of major hostilities, it is worth now considering some consequences of globalised political spin for the leaders and for their societies.

First, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are less popular now than they were before the war started. Prime Minister Howard has suffered less, probably because Australia's intervention was smaller and shorter--and because of the Labor Party's ongoing leadership crisis. Messrs Blair and Bush have been damaged because events failed to follow the spinners' script. They ignored repeated warnings that ousting Saddam would be easy but that pacifying Iraq would be hard.

Second, in all three countries the tendencies of citizens to be sceptical and suspicious and to distrust government leaders have intensified markedly. Citizens in democracies are disposed to be receptive to spin because they want to believe that their leaders are clear about the national interest, know what they are doing, and are assiduously honest about decisions as momentous as decisions to go to war and to send their sons and daughters into harm's way.

If citizens come to perceive that they have been conned by spin, and that their consent has been obtained by deception, their resulting cynicism can jeopardise not only the spinners themselves, but the longer-run integrity of the wider political system. The consent of the governed has to be informed consent. If it is seduced consent, created by the meretricious fabrications of spin doctors, then democracy itself is at risk of degenerating. This is a lesson all governments might learn from the Iraq war spin campaign.